Question about my CD-R Drive

[Mason R Butler]

Everyone asks tech questions here now, so I will too since this one's been bugging me.

Sometimes my CD-R drive stops being able to read discs. It usually happens right after I burn something. If I put the disc back in to view the files, it recognizes it as a blank disc and continues to recognize all others discs as such until I restart the computer. Any idea what's going on here?

[severin]

Originally posted by Mason R Butler
Everyone asks tech questions here now, so I will too since this one's been bugging me.

Sometimes my CD-R drive stops being able to read discs. It usually happens right after I burn something. If I put the disc back in to view the files, it recognizes it as a blank disc and continues to recognize all others discs as such until I restart the computer. Any idea what's going on here?

this can happen when the burning program doesn't release the cd-drive. have you tried closing the burning prog?

[Mason R Butler]

Originally posted by severin
this can happen when the burning program doesn't release the cd-drive. have you tried closing the burning prog?

Yes. Sometimes it happens when I haven't burned anything too, like when I try to access things with Winamp. Maybe it's doing something similar?

[DeviousJ]

That's a weird one. If you go into the Device Manager (Windows+Break) does anything have an exclamation mark next to it? Is it a new drive?

[Mason R Butler]

Originally posted by DeviousJ
That's a weird one. If you go into the Device Manager (Windows+Break) does anything have an exclamation mark next to it? Is it a new drive?

Nope. It's not a new drive and has done this for as long as I can remember.

[Nimrod]

Try this:
Remove it from the BIOS, and boot all the way into windows. You shouldn't see it listed anymore.

Shut down. Add it back to CMOS and let Windows reinstall it.

I'm not giving details because I dunno your OS and I dunno anything about your CMOS.

[DeviousJ]

Originally posted by Nimrod
Try this:
Remove it from the BIOS, and boot all the way into windows. You shouldn't see it listed anymore.

Shut down. Add it back to CMOS and let Windows reinstall it.

I'm not giving details because I dunno your OS and I dunno anything about your CMOS.

Wouldn't it be better to delete it from windows, then reboot and let it reinstall automatically? Also, you could flash the firmware - check the manufacturer's website.

Hang on, since it's done it as long as you can remember... can you get your computer open? You should check the jumpers are set right - in case you don't know, jumpers are these little things which connect over certain pins depending on your setup, there's usually a diagram of which pins do what on the drive casing. Basically, if you have two drives on one cable, one needs to be set to Master and one to Slave. If they already are set like that, you could try switching them around (as in set the Master to Slave etc - you don't need to move them on the cable).

Other things you could try are looking in the Device Manager and seeing if DMA is enabled on the CDRW (mine works better without), and Sync Data Transfer shouldn't be enabled unless you're on SCSI (if you don't know then you're not)

[Nimrod]

Originally posted by DeviousJ


Wouldn't it be better to delete it from windows, then reboot and let it reinstall automatically?

Nah, same difficulty. Besides, I like having one full boot with nothing there, but to each their own I suppose.

[DeviousJ]

Quiet you